came to me in a dream five years ago
on the shores of a city made of gray sand and
brown water tide pools and
no sign of a moon or stars or clouds and
spires of termite tubes hollowed out
for human use and enough flies
to choke a lung if there were any
need of breathing in an afterlife.
I blinked and he blinked
his two foot high wide eyes brown veined
retina blacked and said his name was
all I remember hearing was a million horsed engine's noise.
Fire compressed into cylinders and
steel blade chopped and blowing
through the back of his head and out of his
mouth that sucked the thick water from
the ankle deep slur of earth
eating our feet and spat it hot across
my face.
The sound was the name of the Devil himself,
if I ever heard it blow across my ears hard
enough to pull the skin away like hairs
against a hurricane and he blinked
his two foot high wide eyes brown veined and
I blinked back, afraid for my
second life and this time aware
that if I did lose
my life there would be nothing else.
The chrome god came to me again
yesterday and this time stood
no taller than before, face wide, eyes thinner and
we talked, entirely this time, about him.
The city was gone, fallen into its own mouth,
leveled by its own power and heat
to its buried solid grounds, the oceans
so evenly distributed with the departure of all
celestial influence that it became a
bright gray marble in some telescope's eyes.
Walking in this world
instead of that other,
he was so much the same and
I bit my tongue
to wake myself and failed.
"Write it for me," he asked if I could remember his name and
the skin at my cheeks began to crawl and my ears started to scream and
my nose began to bleed
because I had no way to spell a sense
with no expression so he said
"I will do it for you."
On that hill, against a star burned sky,
with his big toe and a down cast eye,
the other still square on my own,
he wrote in the short grass and litter
weather whip shreds of plastic shopping bags and
spray paint cans
nine letters
that lit little fires and
left gray ashed dirt
where I need not go
to know nothing has grown there since
a name I wake wide eyed with in the middle of
summer nights since. A name I thought I left behind,
a name I want nothing to do with.
